Halos & Lassos

Asthmatic Kitty; 2006

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If Christian music has been less maligned of late, its saving grace has been a handful of artists who approach their faith with nuance and vulnerability rather than the kind of oblivious cheerleading that is the genre's earmark. So when Sufjan Stevens pens a song as compassionate as "John Wayne Gacy, Jr.", he's hardly promoting clown-costumed serial murder. Instead, he's acknowledging that life isn't as black and white as the majority of Christian music would have you believe.

You'd think a little of that emotional depth would have rubbed off on John Ringhoefer, aka Half-Handed Cloud, when he served as trombonist in Stevens' touring band, the Illinoisemakers. But on Halos & Lassos, Half-Handed Cloud's fourth full-length, Ringhoefer continues his relentlessly upbeat exploration of his Christian faith with all the willful naiveté of a Sunday School lesson planner. It's hard not to roll your eyes at cutesy declarations like, "The world is still the Lord's/ The devil's just a squatter" or the nursery rhyme directness of "You get all the credit and you get all the praise/ Got us out of messes and pulled us out of graves." But, to be fair, Ringhoefer's songs are teeming with enough biblical allusion and tongue-in-cheek theology to elevate it above 99% of Christian music.

Like past Half-Handed Cloud albums, Ringhoefer doesn't skimp on sugary pop, but Halos & Lassos strays from his formula with the addition of the Omnichord, a vintage synthesizer that spits out a canned rhythm section, video game soundtrack keys and a gurgling water effect. It's a novelty that tires very quickly. But still, out of the Omnichord's thrift store lo-fi, each song blossoms with the integration of an organic instrumental palate. Beautiful passages of piano, banjo, marimba, and bells erupt out of the monochrome of ersatz drums and sustained eight-bit tones. On the album's longest track, "You've Been Faithful to Us Clouds", the song bobs along to a synth arpeggio before abruptly transitioning into a saccharine multi-part harmony. And as sparse live drums punctuate Ringhoefer's oohs, the vibrancy of a live performance rescues the song from languishing in demo hell.

Half-Handed Cloud's real draw, though, is his peculiar, ADHD take on pop music. With 19 songs clocking in at just shy of a half-hour, the album's spitfire sequencing speeds by, making you feel like the Ramones wrote some really epic songs. It's a quirk that's both frustrating and enticing: There's no chance of digesting these songs on the first, second, or even third pass, but the blink-and-you'll-miss-it nature of it all leaves a listener hungry to make sense of such a confounding blur. If you're blessed with the patience to unpack such a dense record, Halos & Lassos has enough compelling melody to help you forgive that ubiquitous Omnichord and some truly cloying lyrics. And, surely, that's something worthy of our praise.